No matter where you stand on guns — controls or no controls — a new Rutgers-Eagleton poll in today's Star-Ledger says 66 percent of Americans are "very concerned" about gun violence.

And yet, not a word about random shooting sprees or urban crime at either party convention. The gun issue, we're led to believe, is a political minefield. So the candidates, and their party platforms, ignore it.

This is not a column about gun control. This is a column about fear.

Murder rates in America have exceeded today's throughout our history. You can look it up. From Chicago in the 1880s ... yes, 1880s ... to New York in the 1980s, crime has been much worse than it is today. Crime was a major campaign issue when Bill Clinton ran against George Bush. Today, it never comes up. Talk of crime eventually leads to talk of gun violence, which leads to talk of gun control, and you know where that leads: hyper-reflexive rhetoric on both sides.

So regular, working people in cities like Camden and Newark continue to live in fear that the next gang-related drive-by will take down one of their loved ones. An "unintended target" in cop parlance.

And random multiple shootings continue to erode our feeling that this is a safe country. And they are multiplying.

This is a fact, too. The anomaly of the Unruh murders in Camden in the '40s and the Texas clocktower killings in the '60s have given way to Colorado, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, the Amish schoolhouse ... and on and on. Shocking in the numbers killed, in their locations, and how quickly they seem to come.

And now two New Jersey families buried their children last week; two kids who went to work at the Old Bridge Pathmark and were shot by a mentally disturbed co-worker. (Horrible as it is, it could have been worse. Terence Tyler fired 16 rounds, and had a loaded .45 which he turned on himself.)

So no matter how you feel about guns — are they the problem or the solution? — we should all be concerned that there is no dialog on the political front about how to curb the culture of violence. Concerned and disappointed. We are, after all, electing leaders.